If you ever wanted to understand the expression “shift the power” and ‘red nose day” the place to be was the Shift the Power (#StP) learning and convening event in Accra, from 9th-12th October, where a search for the definition of #StP and ‘Red Nose Day’ unpacked the phrases.
A rare fundraising strategy to find, ‘Red Nose Day’ is an annual fundraising campaign created by philanthropic organisation, Comic Relief to end child poverty throughout the world. Red Nose Day is all about making a difference in the lives of other people. The money raised goes towards helping so many life-changing projects in the United Kingdom and across the world.
Participants during the convening
The four-day conversation on “Shifting Power in Development Practice” saw anchor partners implementing the #StP in Ghana (STAR-Ghana Foundation & the West Africa Civil Society Institute, WACSI), Malawai (Tilitonse Foundation) and Zambia (Zambia Governance Foundation), Comic Relief, and a bilateral organisation - the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO, UK), come together for a productive meeting at the Alisa Hotel in Accra.
They reviewed the programme, shared knowledge, and strategised on better ways of working.
In Ghana, the #StP is being championed through a programme dubbed “Civil Society Strengthening Programme” (CSSP-#StP) as an enabling long term investment support for civil society in their diversity–organised and informal groups, think tanks, community-based organisations, among others.
The CSSP-#StP is an eight-year programme being implemented by STAR-Ghana Foundation and WACSI, with funding from Comic Relief and the FCDO, aims to provide long term support to Civil Society Actors (CSAs) in Ghana, contributing to their resilience, responsiveness, and effectiveness in delivering the priorities of their constituents.
The programme aims to provide long term support to CSAs in Ghana, contributing to their resilience, responsiveness, and effectiveness in delivering the priorities of their constituents.
It seeks to build institutional resilience of civil society organisations (CSOs) in Ghana by providing a more progressive, negotiated, participatory and widely owned solution to social development work.
Team Ghana -STAR-Ghana Foundation & WACSI
As Eunice Racheal Agbeyandzi, Head of Programmes at the STAR-Ghana Foundation puts it, the #StP is different from other programmes because it is a long-term investment, a programme that reaches out to smaller orgnaisations that usually may not receive support by other programmes though they may be doing good work, and thirdly, the programme invests in capacity development, which is important.
She explained the #StP starts from different levels, from the anchor partners as institutions that support civil society - if you are into grant making how do you change your systems to be able to work with civil society, and if you are capacity builder how do you do the same.
“I believe the #StP has relevance for organisations first but then it also has relevance for the entire quality humanitarian development process where the decision making has been around who is funding and has the power to determine what to fund.”
“How do we balance the imbalance to ensure that decisions around money use, where it goes are both created by those who have the funding and the capacity, the expertise, legitimacy, among others to implement,” she said.
Read more: https://www.gbcghanaonline.com/news/civil-society-strengthening-programme-launched/2023/
On her part, Nana Asantewaa Afadzinu, Executive Director of WACSI, said the #StP is about how to combine powers and efforts to really change and transform a system that has been historically discriminatory, when it has to deal with organisations working in the global south in the way they engage.
She noted that very often there is talk about the power that communities have, the agency that dwells therein –what they do themselves with traditional leaders, local government, among others.
“We are not really talking about that power that communities have. And so, when we are talking about shifting power, I think that we must really centre this power of communities and it is one of the most powerful things about this programme.”
“We recognise that we often look at the power that international organisations have - power that mainly is utilised and even acknowledged by the organisations in the global North,” she said.
Consequently, she said the #StP is not only about ensuring that we have international power - global north, global south, but we are also looking at how are we centring the power that our communities have.
“It is a prototype for us and how we relate with each other as bilateral, local, philanthropic, and international organisations, our processes, how we work with each other and our partners. We are also being tested,” she added.